Pros: 100% uptime on Wisdom; no interference with JotJ; Holy spends the minimum amount of time judging possible

Cons: Slightly less than maximum heal from Light possible; if Protection is not tanking the focused mob, Wisdom is not helping the bulk of the raid.Personally, I like Solution 2. It maximizes DPS, and leaves healing in the hands of the healers. Large amounts of passive healing is very helpful, but can be compensated for by direct heals. In my mind, ensuring maximum DPS is more likely to win the fight for you than extra undirected healing.

However, there are other opinions. Ferraro argues for Solution 1, insisting that it is not very hard for a Holy paladin to have 100% uptime on Wisdom. I'm skeptical of that claim, especially as the fights get harder. If something goes wrong, Judging is the first thing to be dropped by a Holy paladin, in favor of spamming heals.

Solution 3 is pretty good, but if you don't have a Protection paladin, you end up having to go back to the Light/Wisdom debate. As well, if the Protection paladin is off tanking her own mob in a corner, then the raid doesn't get the benefit of her Judgement.

Posted by
Rohan

29 comments:

Dontatsu
said...

At least in our raids, there is so much overheal across the board and JoL is usually the highest, it seems like potentially losing some mana in return for a questionable healing benefit is an unwise choice. I agree with you...option 2 seems to make the most sense.

Personally, I'm more of a fan of Solution 3. I just posted something like this yesterday to my guild's forums in an effort to try to get our pallies judging as efficiently as possible in 3.1.

We generally have our prot pally tanking a variety of mobs, so I'll personally switch up to wisdom on the main mob if she's not on it (ie: Sartharion or drakes while she's on the flame adds), but like you said, it really is the first thing to go when healing gets really intensive.

The whole judgement debuff thing is very much a bad logic puzzle, to be honest, and while I understand the overpoweredness of 40yd Judgement of Justice in PVP, I hate how PVP is going to screw with our judgements in PVE.

I can say from first hand experience that there's not a single encounter in Ulduar where the healing is so intensive that a Holy paladin can't spare a global cooldown or two, and if you do anything but spam Holy Light the entire time, the raid wipes. Not even Brutallis was that unforgiving.

Whether you move to position - and there's a lot of this on almost every boss - or just before or after a Holy Shock, you can always find a time to Judge. I never found a legitimate excuse or reason to let a 20-second buff to drop off the boss.

But again, as I said in my post, no combination (or lack thereof) should be vital to the raid. Whatever gets the boss dead and sparkling, go with it.

Ret also applies bonuses to their judgement (Heart of the Crusader), however since it appears as a seperate buff it might remain despite having their judgement overwritten. You ignore Solution 4, which is what our guild uses:

That's for the typical raid group, anyway... we've got three rets including myself and no tanks and only one holy pally. So essentially, one ret does light and one does wisdom, and the other does whatever the hell they feel like at any given time.

I think it's absolutely hilarious when the Ret paladin in our raids judges Light. I mean, I ask him to just because he DOES SO MUCH DAMN HEALING with it, and it makes my job easier. But when he judges light he _easily_ surpasses me in healing on any boss fight and usually lands in the top 1 or 2 healers (out of 7) for that encounter. =/

It might be worth mentioning the various Judgement talents that are incentives for each spec. A Holy Paladin would be stupid not to judge every 20s since they would be missing out on the healing bonuses from their Judgements of the Pure talent. Prot also has a debuff that reduces the target's attack speed by 20%, but I'm not sure if that will affect bosses.

Go for it, Karl - I recently came to the realization myself that I'm by far the most senior Paladin in my guild (in terms of retpally time, not actual age, lol) and therefor it was my responsibility to take charge as much as was needed in terms of assigning buffs and blessings. I have a little macro made up:

Pallypower now handles blessings AND auras... maybe it should have a seal assignement row too. I only play 10man so it is not something you cannot work out in voicechat, but for a 25 man, I'd probably make the 'class leader' work much easier.

My dream Pallypower would also list the amount of health each pally's Judgement of Light would heal, similarly to how it tells you who has improved blessings, but you can probably guesstimate it without much of an issue.

In that case, Ret with Light, Holy with Wisdom and Prot with Justice is the most logical setup, but I find that when we have holy paladins, they don't judge consistently as far as I can tell by debuffs, which means wisdom will fall off.

If prot and holy both judge wisdom, you run into variable speed attacks from the boss as the tank's -20% speed bonus is applied and removed depending on who landed the last judgment.

Alarius said:A Holy Paladin would be stupid not to judge every 20s since they would be missing out on the healing bonuses from their Judgements of the Pure talent.

Actually, that's not the case. Holy Paladins gain 15% spell/melee haste for 60 seconds each time they judge something (anything!) because of Judgements of the Pure. There's no healing bonus and it's a 60 second buff. Therefore, in 3.1, given 1 ret, 1 prot and 1+ holy paladins in my guild's raids, I'm recommending the holy pallies and rets judge light (for uptime) and the prot judges wisdom (for uptime).

In healing-intensive fights (OS3D and many fights in Ulduar) the holy pallies just aren't going to be able to keep a buff up all the time due to all the damage being done out there. Losing 3 globals a minute doesn't sound like a lot, but in practice, it really can be.

This comment applies to Pick Up Raids, and does not apply to elite, well coordinate Guilds.I play a raiding Healadin with Naxx-25 gear. In my opinion, you should not rely on a Holy Paladin to keep full uptime on any Judgement. To be honest, Judging is not even in my casting rotation during a Raid-25 Boss. Also note, some raiding Healadins, choose not to spend talent points on Judgements of the Pure, or Improved Judgements. This means shorter range (20) and longer cooldowns (10). I currently have those talent points in 5/5 Kings and 2/2 Improved BoM. Though I admit, I am excited to move those 5 Kings points into something new, when 3.1 goes live.In my dozens of PUG Raid experiences, Pallys do not coordinate their Judges all that often. And n00b Pally's overwrite each others' Judgements all the time. BTW, Pick Up Raids have the same problems with overwriting each others Blessings and Beacons! Gasp!

The MOST you will lose on Judgements of the Just is 8.9 seconds. If that 20% for that amount of time was the difference in a raid, the holy paladin takign ANY time to judge was likely enough to wipe anyway.

Seriously folks, stop acting like holy has to do anything but judge once a minute to keep their haste buff. It is dumb. And with that in mind, the donwtime on wisdom is WAY worse than losing JoJ for a few seconds.

If you are worried about JoJ that much, have the holy = light and ret = light. Not like the prot paladin's HoTC won't still be on. So a few seconds of the hoyl paladin's poor light and then ret's is back on.

The prot paladin should never relinquish a judgment needed by the raid for justice. They will be using that judgment every 9 seconds.

"Judgement of Light scales off of both Attack Power and Spell Power at the same time. So, add both values together and whichever Paladin ends up with the highest number will have the strongest Judgement of Light. Its debatable whether or not the Spell Power a Ret Paladin gets from Sheath of Light is included in this, but even if not, Ret and Prot Paladins almost always have more Attack Power than a Holy Paladin has Spell Power and so are better Light judgers (especially Ret)."